My High-Level Content Strategy

Table of Contents

• ➭ The Gateway Drug Strategy to Content Marketing
• ➭ CQR: My Trillion-Dollar Content Stratagem
• ➭ How I’ll Use My Personal Brand to Grow My Business
• ➭ Running SEO for Clients in the AI Era
• ➭ What say you folks?

As a solo-founder of a digital marketing agency, I’ve struggled with how to approach my content marketing strategy. And since I’m also a bit of a perfectionist and have a penchant for overanalyzing things, I’ve taken a long time to reach a level of comfort around this topic.

This post is an overview of how I plan to approach content for my business. It’s a collection of tried and true tactics other much bigger brands and creators have used to drive trillions of impressions and generate billions in revenue for decades.

The Gateway Drug Strategy to Content Marketing

So I think you can use search content as kind of a launching point to this non search focus content.

JH Scherck, on the Ahrefs Podcast

I didn’t learn a whole lot about marketing in college. But I did learn a thing or two about economics. Good ole economic theory states that as the supply of something increases, the demand for that thing decreases. So, when it came to content marketing, specifically blogging, I’ve always been leery of its efficacy as a marketing strategy for local businesses.

There are approximately 600 million blogs online as of 2024 (Ironically, this is according to two blogs). Needless to say, I was flummoxed. I kept asking myself: How the hell do I cut through the noise of all these look-at-me blogs to build an audience that actually translates to a positive ROI and ROTI–Return on Time Investment–for me and my clients?

Honestly, I didn’t have a good answer to this question until I heard JH Scherck on the Ahrefs podcast recently. His advice: use search-focused content as a launching point to non-search-focused content. Translation: use stuff people are searching for on Google as a gateway drug to the rest of your non-search engine optimized content.

This. Is. HUGE.

Up until this point, something always felt off to me about the way small businesses were blogging. I’ve gotten to see the behind-the-scenes playbook of an SEO agency doing over $1 million a year in revenue, and even the way they approach the blog and content angle for their clients was just meh to me. Their clients were lawyers investing thousands of dollars per month with them to boost their rankings. And though the agency does a ton on the content side, when the blog topic came up they’d explain how the blog’s role is to be a sort of “media room” with articles purely for boosting the firm’s engagement with journalists and news outlets, and not prospective legal clients.

While it makes sense, there was something about this that never really sat right with me. I mean, what’s the point of producing content for a business if it doesn’t map in some way to increased engagement with the people that business is trying to attract as customers?

I struggled with this. And I didn’t want to relegate my business’s blog–or the blogs of my clients–to the ranks of the look-at-me group. It got so bad that I’d start immediately feeling cynical anxiety when I even had a germ of an idea for a blog post title. I’d say to myself, What’s the point anyway?

With the gateway drug strategy I can publish blog posts, build tools, publish videos and infographics, and a whole range of other helpful content based on what people are searching for most on Google. Then, once I’ve gotten their attention with that search-focused, search engine optimized content, I can present them with other pieces of content that bring them further into our brand’s world. It’s so simple, it’s brilliant.

CQR: My Trillion-Dollar Content Stratagem

CQR stands for curate, quote, and repost. This little bitty is my answer to the challenge of being a one-man agency. I can’t produce a high volume of high-quality content. So the next best thing is to leverage the great content of others.

With CQR, I can enjoy content I already consume, and even lean into discovering more interesting stuff, and then share it in some way with people in my sphere of influence.

I can curate content. This means I assemble great content in a listicle format for email or thread style format for social.

I can quote content. As the name suggests, I can quote great lines and share them with my audience like the one above from JH Scherck.

I can repost content. Social media makes it very easy to share content posted by other users. This is a great way to share valuable information while also earning a bit of goodwill from the original poster.

I used to get an email every week from founder of FreeCodeCamp, Quincy Larson (@ossia on X). In his email he’d share a handful of posts in the tech world that he thinks I’d find interesting. Even though I never visited every link in his emails, I did get value out of a few. And that was enough for me to continue wanting to receive his emails every week.

If you’re looking for an easy way to start producing more content, try using CQR next time and see how it works for you. Using a social media scheduler like Pallyy and an email marketing system like Kit or Mailerlite can also make this even easier.

How I’ll Use My Personal Brand to Grow My Business

Here goes in a nutshell: I’ll grow my personal brand to thousands of followers to increase visibility of my agency. In theory this will drive to a least some inbound leads to my business from referrals sent from my personal audience.

This is powerful because it gives me the flexibility of doing what I want on my personal brand side while still getting eyeballs on my business–whether that’s writing about stuff like this, making a random journal-style post, publishing a quick Tella video, giving a talk, or something else entirely.

I don’t want to dilute my agency’s messaging and content with the same random stuff I might publish on my personal blog, so this is a great outlet for me while keeping things separate.

Running SEO for Clients in the AI Era

Here’s the gist:

1. Content volume is no longer an unfair advantage.
2. High-quality content & design are essential prerequisites nowadays.
3. Uniqueness is the new unfair advantage.

AI makes anyone with an internet connection capable producing content. Even the laziest bloggers can use ChatGPT to write a 2,000-word post on a topic and actually get some traffic. But the real unlock and moat for the future is in expertly-crafted content that’s unique and hyper engaging. This is content that takes full advantage of the web, design, and copy to create a complete UI/UX that’s sticky and makes people actually want to keep scrolling.

It’s the term “page-turner” applied to the web–a scroll-magnet or click magnet, if you will. Hell, clickbait even works so long as the clicks convert.

What Say You, Folks?

Hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or shoot me an email. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.